Her Wish

Her Wish [Chapter 37]

The tension was unbearable.

Day in and day out, the only audible sounds within the Blake household were yelling. Even now, Danny could still hear the distant voices of his parents arguing back and forth. Over what, he’d long since stopped keeping track. It had grown to the point where the sound of his parents doing so had become so natural, like a second nature, just blending into the backdrop along with everything else.

If only such could happen so effectively. Because as much as Danny would have liked to completely drone out the enraged shouts of his birthparents, every time he began to reach the point of believing he could succeed in doing so, he became bothered all over again.

Even now, his insides clenched at the distant sounds of his entire family, his entire life, just falling apart on the other side of his bedroom door. His mind wept because he lacked the power to do anything and his spirits fell, sinking back into that rueful state of depression that had now become so familiar to him.

He wanted desperately to escape from it all, but every time he tried in doing so, his actions were stopped short, the image of his older brother’s shaken face, the sound of his brother’s desperate pleas, and the touch of his brother’s trembling hands from his previous attempt returning to haunt him all over again.

Danny couldn’t do that. He couldn’t bring himself to force his brother to go through all that again.

“Danny?”

Danny’s head rose at the call of his own name, the sound of his parents’ quarrel amplified, then droned out once more as the door shut, closed.

His eyes moved listlessly to meet those of his older brother, silently willing for him to decide the next move, for him to suggest anything that would bring this pain to an end.

But just one look in Eric’s eyes and Danny knew that his brother’s expression mirrored his own. The blank, lost, and deflated apathy in Eric’s eyes was the very same that Danny saw whenever looking into the mirror after he woke up each morning. All hopes of his older brother knowing more were torn from Danny once more.

If Eric didn’t know, then who would?

“Eric…” he muttered softly in response, though not expecting much.

Eric paused for a moment, as though hesitating, the words anxiously waiting to roll of the tip of his tongue but his mind instead reluctant, unsure of whether or not he really should do so. He stared at his younger brother, pausing, and suddenly, something in Danny’s stomach clenched tight, as though knowing that no words exchanged could be good.

In those moments that he waited, it felt like the longest prolonged seconds of his life, merely sitting there, peering anxiously into his brother’s dark brown eyes and dreading having to hear whatever his brother was capable of saying.

But no matter how much Danny might have prepared himself for unfavorable news, nothing could have prepared him for what Eric said next.

“Danny,” Eric murmured softly, taking a step closer and hitching a bag over his shoulder that Danny had failed to notice before, “I can’t take this any longer,” he whispered hoarsely.

Danny’s eyes rose, petrified, scared, suddenly unwilling at all to hear what would come next. He began to shake his head, rising to his feet as eyes widened in denial, but Eric was already speaking once more, before he was capable of fully reacting.

“I’m leaving.”

“No,” Danny responded immediately, his fourteen-year-old voice cracking in doing so. “No,” he then repeated in a much firmer voice, asserting authority that was commonly lost whenever in the presence of his older sibling, “You can’t.”